As I have been developing the player editor for Elemental, I have come across a number of unexpected difficulties that were not initially obvious. I had a challenging time figuring out some of these bugs in my code so that I could get it just right. I really wanted the weapons to look like they are being held properly and armour pieces to deformed with the player without clippings like you would expect it to.

There are two main types of mounting that I'm going to cover and one takes much more care and effort than the other. These two types are as follows:

This one is a bit of a cake walk but there were some difficulties that I came across when doing this.

My method basically involves including bones in the player character mesh in the positions where the weapons would be placed. Figure 1 below shows these bones as they are in my current rig. I have created 1 bone in each hand and 2 bones on the characters back. The idea is that 'in game' the weapons will be parent to these pseudo bones so that the weapons simply follow in the characters hands or on their backback.

Figure 1

Here is some sample code showing the general idea:

TModel wepL;
TModel char;
TEntity wepLBone; //Assuming the weapon bone is called wep_L
//Find the bone
wepLBone = FindChild(char, "wep_L");
//Set the matrix of the weapon to be same as bone
SetEntityMatrix(wepL, GetEntityMatrix(wepLBone));
//Parent weapon to bone
EntityParent(wepL, wepLBone);

This method is very simple, however, if the bones are not initially set up properly, there will be complications. My mistakes were two fold. Firstly the scale of my bones was not 1,1,1 in Blender and I realised much too late. Secondly the orientation of x,y,z axis of the bones in Blender did not match the default orientation in LE. These two small mistakes made a world of trouble for a few reasons as I'll outline below.

1. Wrong Scale:
When you call SetEntityMatrix() it sets the scale as well as a number of other things. So because the scale of my bones was about (0.327,0.327,0.327) instead of (1,1,1), when I set the matrix of the weapon to the bone, it would scale the weapon down to 0.327.

As an alternate to spending many hours re-doing the rig I decided to cut my losses and make a work around. For this problem it was simple. I just had to scale them up again immediately after with ScaleEntity();
This was not ideal but I think going back and fixing the rig and redoing all the animations would have been a 'Bear Trap' as Josh has recently coined the term.

One may think you could just use PositionEntity() and RotateEntity() to get the orientation right instead of SetEntityMatrix(). However, both of those functions do not work on entities that are children of another entity. They seem to return the position and rotation of the parent instead of the specific bone. This isn't entirely useful in this situation.

The idea to go into blender and simply use ctrl+a to '0' the scale of the rig without actually effecting its size did occur to me. However, it badly affected the rig's orientation and was not a viable solution.

The key learning here is: Always make sure your scale is (1,1,1) prior to doing any rigging, skinning and animations.

2. Incorrect Bone Axis Orientation
Simply put this problem occurred because the orientation of the bone axis in Blender were not matching that of LE. This was not Blender's fault but mine. I should have edited them correctly before skinning. The effect was that if you set the matrix of the weapon to the bone it would not line up. The model would always be moved to a relative position and rotation to the bone origin. See Figure 2

Figure 2

This meant that once I had set the matrix I had to tweak the position and rotation of the weapon model before parenting it to the bone. The coding of this was not all that hard but it was difficult figuring out which axis's did what and how much I had to tweak it. Imagine if Josh programmed Vec3(x,y,z) to read the x,y,z part in random orders and you'll have an understanding of how annoying this problem is.

Once again I could have just redone the rig. However, that would have taken a very long time. Instead, I cut my losses and went for the work around. After all, the repositioning only has to be done once when the weapon is either taken out, sheathed or loaded and not every frame. Therefore, the performance impact is negligible.

The Key Learning here is: Always ensure you have oriented the axis of your rig bones correctly before doing any skinning or animations.

Mounting Skin Deforming Meshes

Mounting armour and clothing is a bit of a different story as you can't simply parent the model to a bone as the mesh has to deform with a number of bones. This makes things a little more difficult. The way I did this was to skin the armour to the relevant bones and delete all the extra bones (eg. for the boots I only took the foot, toe and shin bones). Then my plan was to parent each of the individual bones in the boots to the corresponding bone on the character model. Figure 3 shows this.

Figure 3

Luckily, problem 2 from the static mounting was not a problem because, in this method we are parenting bones to bones instead of meshes to bones. As the bones on the boots and the bones on the character had the same messed up axis, they kind of cancelled each other out as they were in the same orientation relative to each other.

Now there was only one major problem with this method and it involved the nature of parenting and animation recursion in Leadwerks. Simply put, when you animate a model in LE you set the recursion to 1 so that all children of the model are animated appropriately. Of course, this means that if I parent the boots bones to the character and animate the character, the recursion tells the boots to animate as well. Figure 4 shows how this looks. The right picture is with the boots parented and the left is without parenting.

Figure 4

The problem with this is that the boots only have a single animation frame which is the pose that it was exported with (or modelled in). So when the bones are parented they are moved into position but the animation causes the bones to move to their 'frame 1' positions again except relative to their parenting position.

This may be a bit difficult to follow so I will demonstrate in the following video.

Turn your sound up!

As you could see my solution was to simply not parent the bones, but to just re-position them every frame. Although this probably takes a bit more processing poser I can't see any way of parenting the entity without the animation recursion stuffing it up.

The key learning here is: Never parent bones to animated bones or else animation recursion will have your balls

Thank you for reading. I hope you learned something useful. Feel free to comment or ask questions.

I think your boots deforming means they use the skinning shader and have animation data, which is definitely not what you want. If you change that and still have any problems, I would like to see.

I'm not sure I understand. Is there another way to have the boots deforming with the bones without the skin shader? The boots aren't rigid so they 'must' deform with the body to some extent. If I take off the skin shader (which I did just to check) then the boots simply don't deform at all and it doesn't work.

Haven't worked w/ LE in a while, so there might be some reason I don't remember why this wouldn't work, but how I always handle deforming clothing is just to have every possible deforming clothing item weighted to the same armature and exported in the same file as the character, but as different objects. Then in the engine just disable all the clothing that they are not wearing. I've used this method before and am using it right now for a game I'm working on and it works great.

Haven't worked w/ LE in a while, so there might be some reason I don't remember why this wouldn't work, but how I always handle deforming clothing is just to have every possible deforming clothing item weighted to the same armature and exported in the same file as the character, but as different objects. Then in the engine just disable all the clothing that they are not wearing. I've used this method before and am using it right now for a game I'm working on and it works great.

This does not work with customisable characters. The armour has to have its own bones so that it is exchangeable.

I would not try to parent the boot bone directly to the shin and foot bones. I would name the bones in the boot the same as the bones in the shin and foot. That way the boot will have the same animation data as the foot. Then parent the boot like you did the weapons. Have separate bones attached to the mesh of the boot and foot. Then you can parent those bones and the boot should follow nicely.

Not trying to be critical of you I'm just interested because the issue seems a bit more complex on my side. Its a bit difficult to fully explain with words what's going on. With the way I understand it your explanation wouldn't work either.

No this is just theory, and sorry I can not test it my self right now because my computers are still packed up since I am still remodeling my house.

I was doing the same things you are doing about a year ago and, running into the same problems. I was never really kean on having a underlying animated mesh like you would have with the characters shin and foot mesh under the boot. Everything I have learned always pointed to creating one clean mesh. So I decided to go in a different route. Instead of parenting bones of different body parts or accessories that had to deform, I decided to merge vertices. Now let me explain. For every character there is one bone rig. But the mesh of the character is cut up into different sections. Head, upper body, hands, lower body, feet. Now each mesh section is weight painted to the same bone rig. This way my character editor can just merge the vertices of the head to the neck and everything will animate nicely. Now realize that say each boot will have to have the exact number of vertices as the shin, or hand to wrist and so on.

Now my character editor is not actual finished because I am a modeler not a programmer. So I was paying someone to make it for me. My first game is not going to need a character editor so I decided to put it on a shelf and let it marinate till the next game. Now saying this I know it will work because this is how a character editor that I used a few years ago worked.

Now after most people watch the video their going to say "I wonder if I could export a character from Iclone3,Iclone4,Iclone5". Sorry you can't. And I have tried several times to contact to ask or beg that they allow game developers to use their tools.